


Nocturne

by foreignobjecticus



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Alzheimer's Disease, Angst, GPSC zine, M/M, PGP, carer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-16 05:21:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29820015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foreignobjecticus/pseuds/foreignobjecticus
Summary: Blake forgets one last time. (Some things have not been tagged to avoid spoilers. Need a heads up on any tags, just leave a comment.)
Relationships: Kerr Avon/Roj Blake
Comments: 6
Kudos: 7
Collections: The House Always Sins





	Nocturne

**Author's Note:**

> From the GPSC’s fanzine _**THE HOUSE ALWAYS SINS**_! Download the full fanzine [**here**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kX3N29d5B2Cdj3Ph00Cf8vwElL6FOPjJ/view?usp=sharing) for amazing art, great games, and fabulous filk. Join the _Gauda Prime Social Club_ Discord server [**here**](https://discord.gg/nvcHh8xTPe)!

Blake was resistant to the brain scan when I suggested it, but a few days later seemed to give in to it as an inevitability. It wasn’t so traumatic, after all; for all Orac’s abrasiveness, the electrodes needed for a scan with it were severely less invasive than how the Federation had performed on Blake so many years ago.

Notably, Orac didn’t spit out the results immediately after it declared the scan completed, and I removed Blake’s electrodes with a heavy sense of trepidation. I could tell he was curious too, but sent him away, assuring him Orac was simply taking its time collating the data with Federation records of his previous conditioning.

“It took this long the last time we scanned you, Blake. Don’t worry; just let Orac get on with it and I’ll fetch you when it’s done.”

Once Blake’s footsteps had receded, I turned to the computer and gripped its case with both hands.

“Alright Orac, what’s the problem?”

It paused, lights blinking in a pattern unfamiliar to me, before it actually spoke with a softened, respectful voice.

“Roj Blake is suffering the initial symptoms of early onset progressive neurological degeneration, more commonly known by its colloquial name _Alzheimer’s disease_.”

“Because... of his previous conditioning?”

“Further tests are required to determine that.”

I numbly slipped the key from Orac.

Would you believe that, in all humanity’s progress, we had still yet to find a cure for such a devastating disease? The brain is a naturally delicate organ, and science had made great progress in its ability to mould and reshape the neural pathways that made a person a person; it was what they’d done to Blake’s brain _twice_ in his short life. I scoffed at that. 

Fifty-five years. It was barely a breath on the wind, a drop in the ocean. What was fifty-five years?

No, but for all of humanity’s ability to manipulate the brain, we had yet to be able to _repair_ it; stop the apoptosis of cells in a way that wouldn’t lead to cancerous growth, halt the natural ebb and flow of cell regeneration and feed the mitochondria fresh cellular energy. Regeneration in its most literal sense.

I wondered whether it was the product of centuries of Federation rule; why rehabilitate the sick, halt the degeneration of the aged, when such people were the least threat to the Federation’s continued existence? With cosmetic regenerative procedures and the ability to replace body parts nearly ad infinitum, the preservation of the brain was not a major concern for scientists; either you had a strong, resilient mind, or you decayed. And so was the end of it.

It hardly seemed fair. Or at least that’s what Blake would have said.

When I researched the disease in greater detail, I was shocked to find Blake was already so far gone. The symptoms to which he suffered spoke of a _mild decline_ , and suddenly, indelibly, the symptoms were imprinted on my own mind. I noticed _everything_.

A stumbled word, an indecision, grasping for the name of a colleague when he always took such pride in knowing the staff from the cleaners upwards.

At the end of the second day, things that I had dismissed as Blake’s overtiredness were now all at once horrifying markers for the inevitability to come.

When he asked me later that night what Orac’s scan had found, I almost wished he would ask me to help him die now, before I lost him. Before he lost himself.

He took it remarkably well, all things considered; I’d never thought of Blake as a man to roll over and let circumstance get the better of him. Nothing stops Roj Blake.

“Well then, I suppose I’ve got a lot of work to do and a lot less time to do it than I thought.”

He planted his hands flat on the table, a gesture of strength and defiance he so favoured in Lindor’s political war rooms when he bargained with Outer Planets and bartered with rebels and allies. To him, this was just another game. I said as much, but for all the anger that was boiling within me, an undertone of quiet resignation was all that managed to lend colour to my words. It was gratifying in the very least to see his face soften, but I felt no small measure of guilt when the mask he had put on slipped and he pressed a hand over mine.

“We’ll make every minute count.”

***

True to his word, Blake really did take advantage of the time he had left, squeezing value out of every moment as if he were already living on borrowed time. A long time ago, I’d thought that we were. The idea that we could be again had never occurred to me, and I rejected it now while I still had the luxury of that choice.

In the weeks and months that followed, it became easy to forget what was happening in Blake’s mind. He wasn’t always forgetful, and in the great stretches of clarity that marked weeks at a time, I almost believed Orac’s analysis had been incorrect. Listening to Blake soliloquise at night and rally by day, his natural charisma and powerful eloquence were as sharp as ever. He debated with political representatives as well as I’d ever seen him speak, better even on one occasion with a particularly hostile representative from Betafarl (naturally inhospitable at the best of times; my presence at their meeting certainly didn’t lubricate the wheels of political discourse). When I told him that story after the Betafarl diplomat had left, he smiled a sad smile and held my hands, earnestness in his heart and voice when he absolved me of the sins he decreed weren’t mine.

But I’d told him about the War Council before, and he should have remembered Zukan, Xenon, Zeeona; the reasons why we hadn’t involved Commander Del Tarrant in our latest round of talks.

The story shouldn’t have been new to him. He gave absolution to me now as if it had been the first time. For him, it was.

***

I didn’t know whether Blake had bothered to investigate the effects of the disease that was slowly decaying his brain. In my more vicious moods, I thought rather venomously that he didn’t care what was happening to him, or that probably he hadn’t even the consideration or capacity to stop his agonising crusade long enough to spare a thought for me. He took it for granted that I would remain — but I’d bowed to that particular notion long ago, rejoining him after Gauda Prime, crawling back to him on my knees.

Blake would say I had made a noble sacrifice, that I might even have done it out of _love_ , but I didn’t delude myself; I went to Blake because, as had been the case on the _London_ , I had nowhere else to go.

Attraction, physical or otherwise, was the cornerstone of Blake’s very oeuvre, and he wielded his power over others like a weapon. For me, it was the Sword of Damocles. I was tethered to his side long before my resolution wavered and had begun sleeping with him. But ten years, no — _fifteen_ had passed now, and loathe as I was to admit it, I could say with utter sincerity that I couldn’t imagine my life without Blake. _Could_ say. But didn’t.

And that was why I was sure, for the longest time, that he hadn’t looked into the symptoms of his disease. He knew I’d stay, and he knew _I_ knew that he’d hold on to the bitter end.

It was a frigid and icy winter’s evening when I realised I had been wrong. We had been sitting in the study together, as we were wont of the cold nights. Living on Lindor, Blake had spent the better part of twenty years spearheading the foundation of the Rebel Alliance; a democratic party of elected officials, Blake included, slowly turning the tide of the galaxy one planet at a time. 

Sarkoff had been a staunch supporter, and after his death, his successor — and the people of Lindor — voted unanimously to remain in the Alliance. Tyce, his daughter, was a vocal member of the party, much more driven than her father had been to see that her home planet, and by extension the Rebellion, survived and flourished. I had very little dealings with the woman personally, but I still recall with clarity the day she cornered me in Blake’s office in the Council Hall, mere days after Sarkoff’s death, and presented me rather awkwardly with a set of keys and a sealed envelope. 

“At the bequest of my father,” she said, her voice unwavering, and she pressed the keys into my hand before I could question her. 

“He left this for Blake,” she brandished the envelope between us and I could see it was filled to bursting with papers. Sarkoff’s plans, or at least the things his successor didn’t need to know. 

Tyce gave me a pointed look. 

“Blake is off-world,” I cocked an eyebrow. “You know this.” He’d missed the funeral. 

The woman nodded then and accepted my word that I’d give the envelope to Blake. She placed it reluctantly in my outstretched hand. 

When she turned to leave, I called out to her. 

“Why give me the keys?” 

I clutched the ancient iron in my hands. Undoubtedly they were something of Sarkoff’s; who else would have such anachronistic things?

Tyce turned around in the door and smiled dimly.

“I imagine you would like to move your things in before Blake returns. It would be a nice surprise for him; he always admired my father’s collections.”

And so we moved into Sarkoff’s old house. It wasn’t extravagant — Blake would never have been able to live here if it were. It was large, and comfortable. But in the winter it suffered; a home on Lindor without modern heating was lunacy. 

So like all evenings the past month gone, we ended up in the study late into the night, I by the primitive, roaring fireplace and Blake hunched over his great oak desk, fingers wrapped in his pure white hair and tugging at the loose curls. He was frustrated, tired, and his knuckles were aching. I could tell; I’d been watching him over the top of my book for the past half hour. I didn’t flinch when he tossed his pen down on the desk and clasped his hands together in front of his face.

“Perhaps it is time for bed.” I closed my book softly and laid it aside, ready to stand and guide Blake to our bedroom when he suddenly growled. I looked up in confusion.

“Blake—?”

“It’s no good!” he grit his teeth at the plans before him and reached for his pen with his left hand, resetting his fingers around it and trying and failing to write.

“Have you tried your dominant hand?” I risked a facetious remark and lost. Blake turned to me and spat indignantly.

“My knuckles ache Avon, and I can’t get the pen to—” he cut himself off, struggling for the words he couldn’t find. Rather than let him flounder and grow angrier still, I crossed to his side and laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Sleep would do you a world of good.”

“No,” he shook his head and gave me a tight-lipped smile. “I just need a break.”

He looked towards his discarded cup from our tea earlier that evening and I took the hint. I reached for the saucer but Blake stopped me.

“No, no,” weariness was creeping into his voice. He stifled a yawn. “Tea will just put me to sleep.”

“Coffee?”

I raised an eyebrow and he smiled sheepishly. We both knew the lateness of the hour just by how he drooped with fatigue. I didn’t have to tell him tonight to go to sleep; he would come soon enough.

“Alright then, no. But maybe some biscuits?”

I scooped up the dirty cups and left for the old servant’s exit but only made it a few steps down the hallway before I heard my name being called. I turned on my heel with a huff and returned to the room.

“Avon!” Blake called out again, panic in his voice, and my irritation gave way to the sudden spike of adrenaline that coursed through my veins.

“Yes?”

Blake’s face was— he looked distressed, but in those few moments before he turned to the rear door of the study and spotted me, I saw something in his eyes that I hadn’t seen in him since Gauda Prime. Fear.

“Oh!” he jumped a little and his beautiful smile dazzled me like it always did. “There you are. I wasn’t sure where you’d got to.”

My stomach dropped like a chunk of ice were weighing it down, and it must have shown on my face because Blake’s smile disappeared and he turned fully at his desk, eyes wide, though he said nothing. I found my voice but I don’t know from where.

“I’m going to get some more biscuits for you. I won’t be long. Alright?”

Blake nodded solemnly, and I felt an urge to check what I had said had actually gotten through to him. Somehow, it made me feel as if I were speaking to a child.

“Where am I going?”

He started at the question, looking almost angry for a moment, but he took it in the spirit it was intended and replied:

“You’re going to the kitchen. To get more biscuits.”

The silence between us dragged on for some time and I stood there, unwilling to leave until my back twinged in protest of standing so still and I nodded, retreating. When I returned with an overloaded plate of biscuits, we didn’t speak a word to one another.

***

When he started pulling out old clothes from the depths of his wardrobe, I remarked on it fairly quickly. Blake just looked down at his old, billowing poet’s shirt and shrugged when I fingered the buttons.

He couldn’t tell me he’d lost weight. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed it himself, not if he couldn’t recall that just a few weeks ago he’d been able to wear his crushed velvet trousers without the need of a belt.

I ran my hands around his waist, tucking the shirt in for him, feeling the unfamiliar jut of his hip bone under my fingertips. I’d seen, I’d known. He’d fallen last week; slipped in the shower, and he winced as my fingers prodded the bruise on his flank. It was healing slowly.

“You haven’t been taking lunches, have you?”

If my accusation irritated him (as it always had in the past), he didn’t show it. Instead, he tilted his head, obfuscating, _lying_ in place of a memory.

“When I have the time.”

“Like you have time for breakfast?”

One meal a day. If he didn’t refuse dinner.

He was busier than ever these days; running up and down to the Council Hall, dropping out of one vizcast only to join another minutes later, juggling the little details of his master plan with skill but increasingly less dexterity. When I walked past Blake’s rooms, I used to hear rousing, eloquent speeches flowing from his lips, enchanting the contacts in his calls, weaving his little tapestry of Rebellion. It was incomprehensible, complicated as it was, so infinitely _delicate_ , that I knew when the time came for me to pick up where he left off I would likely find the whole thing unravelling in my hands. If it weren’t for Tarrant, who’d started accompanying Blake on his calls, I knew the Rebellion would be lost.

I told Tarrant about Blake’s condition very early on. I knew he could be trusted. And to give credit where it is due, Tarrant had made a fine job of inserting himself into Blake’s operations. He reported back to me discreetly and walked Blake home in the nights when they’d worked late, seeing him off with a smile that faded more each night as the weight of reality bore down on his still-young shoulders.

He delivered Blake back to me particularly late one evening, and as Blake divested himself of all the detritus he kept about his person, Tarrant spoke to me in a low voice through the half-closed door. 

“There’s another meeting at nine tomorrow to secure the final notes of the Saurian Accord. I told Blake he doesn’t have to be present but—”

“I’ll make sure he’s there,” I pushed the door, but Tarrant stopped me, the sudden apprehension in his eyes enough to give me pause. He looked... _hurt_ ; it was a look I’d seen on his face only a few times before, so long ago I’d almost forgotten what it meant.

“You know he’s carrying a little notebook around?” he fished, eyes dancing across mine, obviously hoping he didn’t have to explain, but I replied in the negative. “It’s to jog his memory, I think. It’s got my name in it,” he smiled weakly, “and— well—” he gestured, embarrassed, upset, clearly not wanting to explain what I could find out for myself. Whatever it was, it had to be personal, and I quashed the feeling of exposure that swelled within me. The feeling was irrational; Tarrant already knew everything.

When he left, I turned to the table in the hallway, picking through the emptied contents of Blake’s pockets. Pens, scraps of paper, notes, the spare house key tied to a cord just long enough to loop around his neck. He’d lost his own key only a week ago, and the fight we’d had over it had nearly driven him from the house. He’d thought the suggestion of wearing the key on his person childish, and he refused to do it. He was _fine_ ; he wouldn’t _misplace_ it. (Blake was uncharacteristically subdued when, only a few days later, we had to have the locks changed.)

I pushed the key aside and picked up the small, black notebook beneath it, flicking through the pages. Blake was an avid note-taker, a habit he’d maintained as long as I’d known him. His handwriting was never neat, and he often complained of sore hands come night time, but right away I found the page Tarrant had mentioned, right at the back of the book, written upside down, presumably for easy reference. His writing was scrawled in an uncontrolled, messy hand:

_Vila Restal, thin light hair, thief..._ _Take him to Del 10! He’s waited long enough_

_Jenna Stennas, blonde, smuggler..._

_Cally, Auron, telepath..._

_Gan Olag…_

I tore the obituary from his notebook and crushed it whole.

***

I’m not quite sure when I started to feel alone, when Blake’s presence was no longer a comfort to me but rather more like a drain; a gaping, cancerous chasm eating away at where something once had been. It seems something of a paradox to admit when Blake was rarely far from my side anymore, but within the scant autumn months before Lindor plunged into its icy winter — somewhere in those months I lost Blake.

It wasn’t sudden, but after over a year of slow regressions, my realisation felt abrupt that he had reached the stage where his mind had started betraying him in ways that someone even as stubborn as him could not ignore.

He was hunched over his desk as he always was lately, rifling through notes repeatedly for names and dates he should have known. He knew, when I saw him looking up Tarrant’s name and rank for the fourth time, that he was retreading old ground; it was obvious by the way he moved jerkily, irritated, trying to keep calm through this now-familiar frustration. What I didn’t expect was the imminent explosion smouldering beneath.

“I can’t remember!” he ignited and blew, hurling the datapad in his hands to the desk where it cracked and flickered to death. “ _I can’t remember!_ ”

I stood slowly, cautiously, not wanting to upset him any further, and with more violence he flung himself from his chair and howled. It was an unnatural sound that rent the cool evening air and sent chills across my skin. It had been a long time since I’d feared Blake, but I admit now that his mood swings had become more erratic as the months wore on, and when he burned like this I _did_ fear him, feared what he might do to himself.

His breath quickened, chest heaving, and cold fury stole over his features, both eyes wide and bright despite the faded scar. Tears spilled over his cheeks, the edge of raw panic making him wild.

“I don’t want to forget, Avon, _I don’t want to lose it all again!_ ”

He clung to me like a child and buried his head in my shoulder, shaking while I held his softened curls and stroked them until he was stolen by silence once more. There was nothing I could say to make the pain go away, nothing that anyone could do.

***

The decision for Blake to withdraw from political life came down to me in the end. We’d talked about it only a few weeks before when Blake had missed an important meeting with a few key Outer Planet leaders, and his participation in discourse had been waning as he struggled to keep abreast of the issues under debate, let alone the nuances of the discussion at hand. In his last meeting, I had spoken more than him and found myself spewing out Blakeisms that should have been coming from his lips, not mine. Instead, he sat, rendering me with a dopey smile when I’d finished and turned to see if my words were met with any satisfaction on his part.

When the meeting concluded, discussion unresolved, the delegates filed out grumbling and unsatisfied. The meeting was a delicate one, a cornerstone of a series of deals Blake had been setting up for years, and the fact that it was going terribly should have rung alarm bells for him as much as it was for me — more, even.

Instead, I felt him stand close behind me as I watched the last of the delegates leave, and he reached for my hand and squeezed it gently.

“Darling, can we go have some lunch? I’m starving.”

Well, at least he’d realised he was hungry after refusing breakfast. I squeezed back and pulled him along towards our house. The cafeteria had been too noisy for him lately, and I didn’t want him to spoil his appetite with stress.

We didn’t slip away from the meetings unnoticed; I stopped briefly to whisper in Tarrant’s ear, to let him know what we were doing, and as I spoke I could feel the eyes of a dozen others on our backs. Muttering, pitiful, crude, enraged; a hundred different remarks from a great swathe of people that thought their opinions meant something. I ignored them as much as I could, but Tarrant was clearly affected, and he looked between me and Blake with an expression that mirrored some of the more sympathetic faces in the crowd.

Some way or another, everyone knew what was happening to Blake and our bargaining power was gone.

I didn’t take Blake back to the Council Hall after lunch. In fact, we never went there again.

***

Blake hadn’t been eating well at all the past few weeks, refusing meals and drinks beyond a few bites in the morning and the merest sips of water during the day. He was therefore agitated; dehydrated and moody, snapping and uncooperative. 

A nightmare to live with, moreso than before. Eventually I found myself not taking meals either; the regularity that had been instilled in me by Blake’s own insistence on routine just seemed to wither away.

_That_ was harder still, the slips in routine; waking up earlier, staying up later, rousing in the middle of the night to pace, sleepless even though his eyes were ringed with exhaustion. Blake had always been the restless sort but now he was unsettled, and it drove me to distraction.

I often threw him out of our bedroom, telling him not to come back until he’d worked himself tired enough to sleep. Most mornings I either found him pouring over plans, buzzing with an empty pot of coffee beside him, or passed out on his desk.

And in all of this, I was slave to Blake’s moods. When he was angry, he would rage, work himself into a frenzy that ended so uncharacteristically with tears, and then he’d sleep it all off on the sofa or the bed and we’d start the same sorry cycle anew. Each time, it felt a little more hopeless.

One evening, after a rather vicious spell, Blake refused to sleep or eat at all, and I noted with my unwavering attention that he hadn’t eaten in more than a day. It was a sure-fire way of ending up in the same routine of shouting and crying that I was so desperate to avoid.

So I poured Blake a beer and pressed it into his hands, loathe as I was to give him something that might kill more of his brain cells. But he had always enjoyed the foul, bready drink, and if I could get something into him that was more than the same few bites of sweetened, spiced porridge he’d eaten for the past week, I would count it a resounding success. He took to the beer and drained his glass in a few minutes, chatting idly to me as he drank. He didn’t say anything important that I can recall, but he seemed happy to keep speaking as long as I made a few sounds of agreement every now and then. His conversation was beyond comprehension most days, and he drifted from topic to topic without rhyme or reason; it was impossible to make sense of, and he didn’t always respond when I tried to humour him and engage in his erratic conversation.

Looking back on it all now, I might have felt guilty about it; I wasn’t listening. I was so focussed on Orac that evening, on completing its final integration into the greater Lindor network, that I didn’t pay attention to what Blake said and I can’t recall whether he’d been making sense at all before he boiled over.

Blake hadn’t directly asked much of me in the months leading up to this moment, though what he seemed to need, listed in notes and plans passed on to me for review, stretched far beyond the time and resources I had. He wanted me to develop the Rebellion’s computer system, oversee its design and implementation, make it powerful, able to read any Tariel-cell computers connected through the greater interstellar network; in short, build him another Orac. I didn’t have that kind of time, not even if I had been Ensor, marooned alone on a planet without constant disruptions. So I used what I had at hand. Orac’s core system would finally be transferred from his unwieldy, discrete housing and refreshed, redesigned, and reborn into the new network. It was a complex task, beyond anything I’d dealt with before, and while Blake blathered on at me rather than let me carry on with the vital task he’d assigned, I found my patience growing increasingly short.

I poured Blake several more drinks between my work before I realised his speech was slurring and beginning to frustrate him. He’d gotten up from his chair, drink in hand, and was hovering behind my shoulder when I turned to see a grimace on his face. His white knuckles wrapped around his half-empty glass, and he splashed his drink across my desk when he gestured.

“You’re always spending time wi’ him. Never wi’ me’nymore.” His last words were a meaningless slur. 

“What?” I tossed my probe to the desk and steadied his hand, trying to prise the glass from his fingers gently, but he pulled away and let the whole lot pour into a puddle on the floor. “Blake—!”

“S’always him!” he choked out, dropping his glass, and it rolled across the table, bumping into Orac’s empty casing. I reached out to right it, and he cried out.

“Even now you’re touching him an’ not me!”

“You _asked_ me to! This was your plan, Blake; remember?”

Those were not words I had meant to say. Even inebriated, they cut Blake like a knife. I hoped he wouldn’t understand but he did and he stopped, face contorted in an unhappy scowl and he looked, only briefly, as if he might sob.

His eyes were wet, but the spark of life that flashed through them turned to rage and he bellowed:

“S’always him! Always Orac! You can’t even— even stop to listen t’ me‘nymore! S’all you care about. He’s a better love, isn’t he? Knows you; put your— hands and— fingers in him since before we were together, tinkering—”

And then, all at once and rather unexpectedly, he wept. Great fat tears burst over his red cheeks, and he cried like a babe, howling, and desperate.

It— it affected me too. I gathered Blake in my arms and he moulded himself to me, chest pressed crushingly tight against mine. I let him hold on until I was sure I was going to pass out from lack of breath, and when I disengaged from his arms he whimpered pathetically, so I held his hand, squeezed, felt the gnarled knuckles grind and the loose wedding band slide down his fingers with mine.

I slipped it off and pocketed it deftly; a trick an old friend had once taught me. Blake didn’t notice. I didn’t want him to lose it, thought maybe I could put it on a chain around his neck later. 

Blake was still crying when I put him to bed. He shook, tears and mucus wetting the pillow beneath his head until I helped him blow his nose and turned the pillow over for him. Eventually, he slept while I sat up with the soft lamplight my only companion in the darkness.

I was still dressed, lying on top of the sheets, the hot night air stifling me. As I sat there, willing the humidity to break and the Lindor summer to dissolve into rain, I absently played with the ring on my finger. When I noticed, I stopped, reminded of the one that lay in my pocket. I fished Blake’s out and brought it up to my eyes.

A matching gold band, identical to my own but for the size and inscription inside. It was... as tasteful as Blake got. He’d had the things made so long ago now. He’d wanted something to mark our union, though we’d never had a marriage per se. Who would recognise it? Neither of us had any gods nor home with which to make it legal in whatever sense it would have meant. 

His band was dull in places, shining in others where the metal rubbed against his skin. Mine was still gold as they day he had given it to me, as I turned it often — a nervous habit, as though I were checking it were still there.

I slid Blake’s band over my finger and turned it until it fit into place over mine. It sealed the fresh gold inside and left my ring looking bloated and dull. Is this what Blake had meant by having a matching set — that they might be worn together once more? 

Had he known it would be me left wearing his?

I turned and looked at the man lying silent beside me.

He slept well that night.

***

My birthday passed. Blake didn’t remember. Usually he’d make an effort, something to mark the passing of time; now his effort most days was expended before lunchtime, and it was I that marked the time, watching it count down between us. His birthday was only a month later, and when he didn’t remark on it I wasn’t surprised. I cooked him breakfast, doted on him in a way that was more giving than any cheap gift could meaningfully be, though I hadn’t neglected to think of him; he liked gifts. 

The weight of what I had wrapped in my pocket was forgotten until I put him to bed that night. I felt it pressing in my clothes when I tried to kiss Blake goodnight. He fussed, turned his head away, and I felt the sharp corner of the box stab against my ribs.

Later, I hurled it into my bedside drawer and heard the ancient watchface shatter in the box. I crawled into the scraps of bedclothes Blake had left for me. He tossed, turned, kicked. The clock by my head ticked over to midnight.

“Happy Birthday, Roj.”

***

Autumn fluttered by quickly. This year I marked the time not by the turning of the leaves in our garden, but by the fading of Blake’s independence, and in the way each day became a blur as sleep eluded us both. I have always been prone to insomnia, but it was Blake that kept me up at night, squirming under the bedsheets: too hot, too cold, too many pillows, not enough, touching me, holding me, pulling away and taking the blankets with him until I was exposed and shivering. He didn’t want to sleep in a guest room; he couldn’t fall asleep, but at night there was precious little of it to be found with him either and by the time my ragged exhaustion consumed me it would be just on the cusp of dawn.

I stirred, feigning sleep no longer, and pulled myself up to rest against the pillows. Blake was sitting by my side, head in his hands. When I moved, he looked up.

“You. It’s always been you. It’s _only_ been you,” his eyes lifted and caught mine. “Was there ever anyone else?” he asked. The same question he’d asked yesterday. I gave the same answer.

“Do you really want to know?”

Blake looked distant again and his gaze dropped by inches, as if he suddenly found the carpet fascinating. I watched him, quiet, unwilling to break his concentration — or what was left of it. But eventually his eyes returned to mine and I knew he was with me for the moment. Times that were getting few and far between now.

“Avon, you know how much you mean to me?” he asked in earnest, eyes pleading, and he reached across the bed to gather up my hands. I let him, and he stroked my fingers with his own gnarled digits. On bad days, his knuckles swelled and made him miserable (another, more innocuous disease, but one that could be cured given time which Blake didn’t have). I could see holding my hand in his was painful for him so I pulled back, expecting him to chase me like he always did.

This time he let me go, and when I looked back up into his eyes he was gone again.

That was the last time I spoke to Roj Blake.

***

It was early on the morning of Lindor’s autumnal equinox when Blake first hit me. The sun had barely started to think of rising, merely a scarlet stain in the twilight. Something about that time of day turned Blake into a restless savage, and most mornings he prowled our bedroom like a crippled tiger in a cage. Last night he’d hardly slept a wink.

So I was awake before dawn as well, lying on my back in our bed, the covers kicked and twisted laying tangled across my legs. I stared at the ceiling, my eyes dry and gritty from rubbing them. As I lay there, I kept one ear on Blake, and my gut twisted with panic when I belatedly realised the room had gone silent — I had been drifting, on the cusp of sleep without his bare feet sliding across the marble floors. I shot up and winced at a cramp in my stomach, seeing our bedroom door hanging open. _Had I forgotten to lock it?_ I thrust my hand under my pillow for the key I kept there and nearly choked when my fingers wrapped around the cold metal. I had. Locking the door had become a necessity as Blake developed a tendency to wander, and if I didn’t want to roam our house in the early hours of the morning, searching for Blake by the sound of his distressed cries, then I had to keep him inside. Safe. Where he couldn’t get lost, where he could see me wherever he went. Now he was gone, and as I reached the darkened hallway I realised I had no clue where. 

I dashed down the hallways looking for Blake, listening for movement from any of the dozens of empty rooms, and my heart skipped a beat when I heard a sound coming from the end of the long, dark hallway. Blake was in my workshop. 

I was gasping by the time I reached the room and I clutched at the door frame while I caught my breath. There I saw Blake poised over Orac, his hands caressing the top of the perspex case. I’d been working on Orac’s inactive circuits, and its sides were only pinned back together. I realised what was about to happen, but I was too slow to react.

Blake’s fingers fumbled clumsily over the key left perched on Orac’s casing and it fell to the floor. Blake moved as if he intended to catch it with the vestige of a reflex, and his nightgown sleeve caught the open side of Orac’s casing and dragged the computer down with him. In the holy silence of the dawn, it was like a volley of gunfire clattering against the floor, and Orac split as his corner collided with hard ground. His insides fell to pieces and rolled outwards in every direction and his delicate internal hub shattered, spilling its innards, gutted like an animal on a butcher’s floor.

I was exhausted from the latest sleepless night and fury crashed over me. I lunged across the room and lashed out, grabbed Blake by his wrist and held him tight — crushingly so, as I would find out later when his skin had ripened and spoiled with bruises that matched my fingers.

And in return, he struck me.

It was his left hand, and I wish I could say it had been a poorly aimed punch, but even weak as he was, it was a direct hit. I caught myself reeling backwards at the blow. My heels crunched over Orac’s orange and green krylon tubes and they broke underfoot, shards slicing into my skin. I crumbled to the ground and Blake stepped forwards.

“Stand _still!_ ”

I threw my hand out as a warning, and he understood and stopped. 

Still protecting Blake while I was left picking up the pieces; some things never changed.

He didn’t move at all while I picked myself up and cleaned the mess of neural circuits on the floor. Could I piece them back together again, trace the complex nest of connections back and forth through its core, rewire its mind, fix the damage that had already been done?

I kept wiping at my face, sniffing without realising it. My eyes were weeping from the swelling bruise of my blackening eye, and every tear stung my face like acid. My hands grew wet from the tears I wiped away, and that moistened the drying blood on my palms. Every component I retrieved from the floor ended up smeared, the delicate connections tinted with iron red. 

It was pointless. Orac was gone.

I could rebuild it, given time. Its core AI lived on in the greater Lindor network anyway; I had completed what Blake had asked of me. Too late to earn a thank you, too late to see a smile.

By the time I’d gotten the chance to tend to my eye, the bruise had already set in and I knew there would be no chance of it healing quickly. My skin was so thin, so old. Once, a black eye might have healed in a week or two, but as I pulled the soft flesh to inspect the damage, I couldn’t help but notice the depths of the wrinkles that ringed my eyes. The crow’s feet that curled around my temples looked as if they’d been carved with a blunt knife, and it occurred to me with a twinge of something like existential dread that I hadn’t looked like this six months ago. Had I really aged so much? There was a rustling behind me and I focussed my eyes to the figure muttering unhappily in the background of the mirror. He wanted attention. I’d forgotten about him. Had he been standing in the study all this time?

My face was swollen and tender for days afterwards, and whenever Blake looked at me he cast his eyes away hastily like he knew what he’d done, even felt sorry for it. But he couldn’t apologise, not with words, and his face bore no hint of a smile for as long as it took for my bruise to fade from black to a mottled yellowish green. Somewhere along the way he started smiling again, and I thought it remarkable that despite his advanced degeneration, _somewhere_ inside Blake’s mind, he remembered that he was the cause of the pain written so undeniably across my face.

Or maybe I just didn’t look like me anymore, and he didn’t like the stranger I’d become. 

***

I had Tarrant come around to the house in the afternoon, a few months after Blake’s last attempts to draft his memoranda and political outlines. I had transcribed what I could of his more recent work between my duties, though it was close to a pointless endeavour trying to make sense of the scrawls he’d left on the pages. In the end, I gave it up for a bad job and just boxed up the lot — notes, plans, maps, the minutes of meeting after meeting after worthless meeting. There may well have been a journal or two in the documents I tossed together — I knew Blake always kept his journals up to date religiously. So much for the memories now. They all went in the heap together, and when I locked the lid of the document box, I left the key beside it and didn’t turn back.

Blake was trailing after me like a faithful dog when I opened the door to Tarrant, and he greeted me with a nod that turned solemn when he spied Blake by my side, tugging on my elbow and peering into a near dimension only he could see.

“Hello Avon... Blake.” Tarrant smiled, but the gesture was hollow, and it melted from his face as quickly as his pity had overcome him.

Hearing his name spoken from a voice other than my own was clearly a shock, and Blake’s eyes focussed on Tarrant, wide and afraid, without a hint of recognition for his Commander-in-Chief. We’d had no visitors that Blake had seen for the past six months now, but I wasn’t surprised in the slightest to find he’d forgotten someone as important to him as Del Tarrant; it only gave me a marker by which to track his steady decline. I checked off that latest symptom against the list in my mind.

“Everything is in the study.”

I drew Tarrant in and he stepped over the threshold with a great deal of reluctance. As he closed the door behind him and scraped his boots on the mat, Blake whimpered and cried out gently. I turned to find his thumb crammed between his teeth yet again. In his terror, he’d bitten so hard he’d drawn blood.

“It’s alright, Blake, ssshhh,” I pried his hand from his face, not even registering the presence of Tarrant gawping at my side. Placing myself bodily between him and the cause of his agitation, I ran a hand through Blake’s white hair, petting him gently until he calmed.

“Shall we go to the sitting room? I’ll put on a record for you. Would you like that, Blake?” I gurgled sweet nothings at him as if he were a baby, and as he mellowed I turned him and held him steady against the tremor in his legs, praying he wouldn’t pick this moment to fall. He’d had a few tumbles in the last week, but his legs held true this time, and I steered him forwards.

“The great hero of the Rebellion.” I threw the comment over my shoulder to where I’m sure Tarrant had stood dumbly the whole time. “You know where the study is. I’ll meet you there soon.”

I didn’t wait to see him out; Blake was having trouble with the foyer staircase and my attention was drawn.

Blake settled easily with his records playing and I tucked a blanket around him tightly so he would have trouble getting up without my help. He liked the feeling of the soft genuine wool around his body and nestled happily into his chair, leaving me free to speak with Tarrant. The sitting room led on to the study and I left the door open so I could hear if Blake tried to move.

Walking into the next room felt like the first time I’d been without Blake since his retirement. My heart beat a little faster and I swallowed back the anxiety that threatened to consume me, letting the desperate flood of guilty relief cool my veins instead.

“Avon, you look terrible,” Tarrant declared with all the confidence of a man who thought he knew better about one’s life than the person he lectured. I scowled and scooped up the key.

“Thank you, Tarrant; there are in fact mirrors in this house. I am aware of how I look.”

“How did you get that bruise?”

I paused, key poised in the lock of the document box and glared up at him, letting my revulsion boil into my eyes. I bared my teeth in a vicious sneer that I hoped hadn’t lost its sting after so many years. Tarrant and I rarely talked, but he could still cross the line.

“If it were any concern of yours, I would have told you. Mind your own business.”

I turned the key with a flourish and lifted the lid of the box.

“This is everything Blake was working on. I tried to put it into some semblance of order but there is only so far one can go with the ravings of a madman. Make of it what you will, but I know decidedly less of his upcoming plans than you will so don’t bother asking me questions.”

Tarrant dove into the box, rifling through loose papers and thumbing open journals at random, placing them aside as he waded up to his elbows through the rubbish.

“Some of these are Blake’s personal journals.” Tarrant looked up from the box, brandishing a tidy leather notebook I recognised well. I’d given it to Blake — what? seven? — years ago. I could see the pages were worn, every line inked full of memories that would have probably been from around the time we’d settled the Rebel Alliance on Lindor and moved into Sarkoff’s old house on his bequest.

“Take them,” I waved him away and feigned interest with the desk drawers. “There may be something of use in them.”

“You don’t want to keep them?”

“They’re in the box, aren’t they?”

Tarrant laid the journal aside reluctantly and picked up the next one, flicking through it idly, and I saw his thumb catch on a piece of paper protruding from the pages. It was whiter than the others and obviously left as a marker in the journal. When Tarrant slipped it free, he gave it a quick glance before going pale and turned the paper face down, sliding it across the table to me.

“I think you should keep that one.”

I looked down at the paper. In the open, it was clear that the note wasn’t torn from Blake’s journal; it looked so out of place, almost as if it had been left there on purpose for someone to find. Blossoms of ink from the Old Earth pens that Blake favoured dotted the back of the paper like bursts of stars. Suddenly, I felt apprehensive. I didn’t want to look at the paper, and I stuffed it into the open drawer by my hip before I changed my mind.

Just then, my ears perked at the sound of the old, blunt needle skipping on the record in the next room. I tensed, expecting to hear Blake fuss, but the missed bars of music from sonata playing didn’t seem to have stirred him, so I let my attention be drawn back to Tarrant’s expert assessment of the documents I was bequeathing him. He’d moved beyond the dross and into Blake’s official documents, written more than a year ago now; carefully-laid plans that were only just beginning to ripen and bear fruit.

“I didn’t know Blake was planning a counter-strike to the Federation raid on Blainau-3. He didn’t tell us anything about this!”

“You’re lucky he managed to write any of it down at all,” I drawled the words out and could hear the exhaustion in my voice. Tarrant noticed it too. He wouldn’t let it be.

“You know you don’t have to do this alone.” His tone was soft, caring, but it didn’t affect me.

“Blake is beyond the help of others—”

“But you’re _not_ , Avon! Look at yourself! I’ve never seen you this bad. When was the last time you got a proper sleep? Or ate a regular meal? How long has it been since you’ve been out in the sunlight, talked to someone—”

“ _Enough!_ ” I ran a hand over my face to hide the fact that I realised what he was saying was true, at least in part. My hand trembled against my face and I clenched my fist. Turning it over before my eyes, I watched the spider web of bulging veins and capillaries shift around my tendons, the blue lines in my pale, waxy skin looking just like the illegible notes of the half-finished revolution Blake had left for us to piece back together.

“I only meant well.”

As had so many men before him. And look where that got us.

I got Tarrant out of the house as fast as I could. When the door closed behind him, I wondered if he’d be the last friend Blake ever saw. Perhaps I should have offered to let him say goodbye.

***

_Av- Avon, please... yes! ah— Avon!_

I still heard him in my dreams. I still talked to him in the night when he came to me again, young, vigorous, full of the spirit that I’d cursed for twenty years.

He still kissed me in my dreams. Still held me in his strong arms, pinned me beneath his thighs, brought me to the edge of oblivion with his teeth and tongue and clever, eager hands.

We only met in the fleeting minutes before I woke, in the snatches of sleep that echoed Blake’s erratic slumber. I collapsed with him on the bed, day or night, and my body gave in to the exhaustion that plagued it. Oh, but for a full eight hour’s decadent sleep; to slip into dreams that were vivid and unchecked and let myself taste the miserable ecstasy of what I’d once held dear. That I could plunge into the depths of my mind and be swallowed whole by the memory was like falling under the influence of a blissful drug. I either wanted it to consume me or kill me.

My eyes snapped open to the sound of Blake fussing.

I always woke up too soon.

***

I tried to feed him some tasteless, nutritional mush, but he refused the spoon and turned his head petulantly.

“Come now, Blake, just a taste. It’s all I ask.”

Pleading worked. Even now. It always did. Typical Blake.

He parted his sweet red lips and I laid the spoon on his tongue, then pressed his mouth closed with my hand, removing the utensil and managing to leave the majority of the food in his mouth rather than on his bib. There was an art to it.

Like the past few days, all Blake did was sit there, staring, and when I let his jaw free his mouth dropped open and he gasped as if he hadn’t been breathing through his nose. That was a new regression. I snapped his jaw shut again before the mush slid from his tongue and worked my fingers down his skinny neck, massaging his throat and hoping, praying, his epiglottis still knew what to do. When I felt him swallow under my palm, I couldn’t help my sigh.

I don’t think it was of relief.

***

_The Federation took it all; every last scrap of memory, every person I ever held dear. Family, friends, my home, my life, my mind. I was a shell of a man, and I built myself up from nothing. Twice. I really thought I’d made it this time. I really thought I’d live to see the day we beat the Federation and put an end to the tyranny and injustice that their rule has brought upon Mankind._

_Don’t laugh, Avon; the battles have been hard won, but the war is far from over, and just because a general or two may die doesn’t mean the army will fall. I know you care; you’ve_ _always cared_ _. Thank you. I want you to carry on all the good we’ve done when I am gone. What you have done for us, with Orac, has already been more than anyone else could have given. The Rebellion would not be what it is without you._ _I would not be what I am without you. _

_I know you’ll probably sneer at this letter when you read it. I don’t mind. But I hope you’ll make the right choice when the time comes. You always have before, in the end._

_I love you, Kerr Avon. And if I forget that, please remember it for the both of us._

_Roj_

***

[ Chopin — Nocturne Op. 48, No. 1 in C minor ](https://youtu.be/qcVr1Sl5irE)

It wasn’t for me to choose, but the decisions I’d made for the past two years hadn’t been my own anyway; my hand had been forced, as it was once more.

I stole away from the house for less than an hour that morning, secure in the knowledge that Blake had tired himself out wandering our room that night and wouldn’t wake whilst I was gone. Apart from that, coming by the exact compound I required was an easy task, and the chemist was cheaply bought off considering. Perhaps he knew what I intended with the drugs, but even if he guessed, the information would have been of little use to him if he were to blackmail me. In fact, when he recognised me and put the two together, he looked almost _sympathetic_. I didn’t want sympathy.

Perhaps he might have expected me to wait a few days; mull it all over while the vial sat on a shelf hidden in a locked cupboard, out of sight and out of mind. But there wasn’t any point in waiting — too much time had already passed. And Blake hadn’t much left anyway.

That evening, I set Blake up in the sitting room, propped up with pillows in his favourite armchair and besocked feet resting on an ottoman. I didn’t wrap his soft blanket around him (the feeling of being constricted had made him distressed lately, though he shivered without something to cover his thin body — gods knew he couldn’t keep warm on his own anymore). When he was settled, I drew the curtains and set an old Earth record playing on the gramophone.

He didn’t cry out when I left the room, a small mercy. I could get away if his mind were distracted.

Blake had always bemoaned my taste in music; _classical_ , he said, _is a frivolous waste of artistic potential. Classical music can’t evoke passion the way words can, or paintings. No, Avon, classical music is for the elites; those that are comfortable where they are._

Blake’s words were a curated bluff, something I’d never gotten him to admit when he was ali— when we _used_ to sit together in the evenings and listen to Sarkoff’s old record collection. Now, Blake was a slave to the baser side of his mind, and in that husk of humanity I’d found what psychostrategists had known for years was a universal truth: classical music was calming, a balm for the mind, and it soothed Blake now when so little else would. 

The soft hammer falls of the ancient piano were like a sedative to Blake, better than soma and infinitely easier to administer. And as he sat swathed in warmth, blank face aglow with the soft yellow light of the room, I knew he was in his own happy world.

In the anteroom beside, I prepared the syringe and held it up to the light, tapping on the glass to shake loose the air bubbles in the sedative, to make this smooth — for him and for me.

It was all very... simple. Neat. Not like Blake at all.

But that the manner of his death should be simple was almost poetic in and of itself. Blake was very much not simple, and even in his autumn I swallowed down bile at the thought that yes, I could hate Blake for one more thing. That thing may well have been out of his control, perhaps even the fault of the Federation and not some unfortunate quirk of his genome, not a time-bomb that had ticked away within his very cells. I wouldn’t know; I had never bothered to get Orac to do the tests. There hadn’t been much point — and it hadn’t mattered either way.

Blake was still sitting happily when I returned, swaying along to the starting notes of a sweet nocturne, the smile on his face serene, not quite vacant. His eyes followed me as I walked towards him and knelt painfully on the soft carpet by his knees. He grinned when I took his hand in my own and pushed up his nightgown sleeve.

“Are you enjoying the Chopin, Roj?” I asked, and he let his eyes drift closed for a moment as the music swelled and then dipped into a lilting bridge. I’d always enjoyed this piece. After my mother had died, after Anna... _both_ times, this music had found its way to me again and again. And every time, my heart clenched at the sweet chords and fluttering notes in the melancholy adagio crafted to tell the pain of a composer dead a thousand years. Blake liked this piece too. I thought, maybe, it might even have been his favourite, and then I wondered whether I’d picked the record on purpose.

Discordant strains swelled and faded, grew to a soaring crescendo.

Blake’s life, all he’d endured, all he’d fought.

The Federation — the very fabric of our known universe.

Every battle, every hard-won victory seemed to pale in the face of his demise. We hadn’t beaten the Federation, hadn’t even come close. And now the People’s Messiah...

_Fingers slipped clumsily between mine, soft gnarled knuckles catching against my clammy palm—_

The man that humanity had staked its life on…

_Smiling, mouth upturned in the echo of the memory of young Roj Blake—_

Reduced to this.

_A murmur from his lips a voiceless breath that had long since lost its power—_

I waited until his favourite part had ended before I slid the needle beneath his skin. He cried out, jerked away, but I held him still and hushed him.

“Sssshhh Roj, it’s okay,” I whispered and massaged his arm as I withdrew the needle. “It’s over, it’s alright. I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

It wouldn’t hurt.

“I promise.”

He trusted me. I could see it in his eyes.

The sedative would take hold of him fast, spread through his veins with every beat of his bleeding heart.

I looked into his eyes, unblinking, and it still came as a shock to me to think this was it; this would be the last time I saw light in his eyes. I wanted to speak, tell him all the things I had bottled away, all the secrets and confessions I’d always thought I’d have time to tell him. But I never did, not when he had suffered so much, losing his mind day by day.

“You didn’t have time for me, in the end, did you?”

_Tremors in the muscle, a twitch._

“We didn’t talk. I didn’t tell you everything I wanted to say.”

_Mouth open, but not breathing._

“Would you have listened?”

_Mouth closed again, he sighed a little._

“The Rebellion was always more important to you, wasn’t it?”

_The merest hint of a frown, a scowl when I laughed._

I leaned up and cupped his cheek, feeling the week’s worth of stubble prickle my skin. I should have shaved him, made him look nice. I suppose it didn’t matter now.

“I know.”

When I reached up to kiss him, he didn’t turn away. I pressed my lips to his and they were slack. He gasped, breathed in my breath, and I pulled away.

He choked then, tongue spluttering in his mouth while his lungs gasped desperately for air he was too weak to draw, his eyes wide with terror.

And in that moment I saw him again.

“ _Blake—_ ”

He twitched, squeezed my hand with a measure of force beyond what he’d managed before, long fingernails digging into my skin and he cried out. I heard it. His voice, one more time.

And then he stopped.

His eyes glazed over slowly, pupils wide and dark against the rich brown depths of his eyes, and his optic nerves ticked back and forth a few more times, perhaps searching for me in his blindness or perhaps greeting whatever lay beyond the confines of his body and soul.

Either way.

Finally, he was free.


End file.
